Title

Date of Original Version

8-2002

Type

Working Paper

Rights Management

All Rights Reserved

Abstract or Description

A practical approach for documenting software architectures is presented. The approach is based on the well-known architectural concept of views, and holds that documentation consists of documenting the relevant views and then documenting the information that applies to more than one view. Views can be usefully grouped into viewtypes, corresponding to the three broad ways an architect must think about a system: as a set of implementation units, as a set of runtime elements interacting to carry out the system’s work, and as a set of elements existing in and relating to external structures in its environment. A simple three-step procedure for choosing the relevant views to document is given, and applied to the problem of documentation for a large, complex NASA system.